What's Your Number? (2011)

This is a romantic comedy--not the best and not the worst. I watched it on a plane, and that is probably the perfect venue for it. If you were to make plans to go out with someone (even your spouse) to see this movie, you might be disappointed. But here is why I liked it--the couple involved actually become friends before they start a relationship with each other. One of the complaints about the movie from critics is that the couple have no chemistry, but in real life, lots of successful relationships don't start with that. If you are looking for someone to sleep with, then your ability to like them is not all that important. if you are going to spend a year or more in a relationship with them, then you need a lot more than chemistry. And let's face it, enjoying someone out of bed is a lot harder than enjoying them in bed. But you don't see that much of that in movies. This one could have benefited from some snappier writing, but in a lot of ways I liked it better than 'Friends with Benefits' (which did have a more upscale script). So here is the story. Ally (Anna Farris) has been skating through life without really finding herself attached to someone--she is more likely to go out, drink too much and find herself in bed the next morning with a guy than work on the longer term relationship. She hasn't gotten to the point where she can envision herself in a long term relationship, and it only occasionally bothers her. Meanwhile, her younger sister. Daisy (Ari Graynor), is getting to marry a guy she went out with in high school but then broke up with--but is now a good looking successful guy who seems to be head over heels in love with Daisy. On top of that Ally's mother (played pitch perfect by Blythe Danner) is all too eager for Ally to make a 'good' match (there are a lot of cautionary tales for mother's of marriagable children--a veritable manual of what not to do). Every romantic comedy has a leap of faith moment and here is the one for this movie--Ally reads an article in a magazine that sets her off balance. In what is undoubtedly methodology that wouldn't stand up to scientific peer review, it reports that women have an average of 9 sexual partners over the course of their lives, and, most damningly, women who have more than 20 sexual partners are unliekly to ever marry. Ally quickly does the math and realizes she is at 19. Uh oh. She panics. Then she asks her mostly married girlfriends what their life totals are--and they are predictably half her number. So she decides to go back over her past lovers, and try to find one that she can live with. Literally, like for the rest of her life. She gets her very hunky neighbor, Colin (Chris Evans), whose personal number of sexual partners is in triple digits, aas evidenced by the stream of different women leaving his apartment in the same clothes they arrived in the day before, to help her track these guys down. And the rest of the story unfolds in pretty much the way you would predict. A light diversion with some good lessons underneath.